How Detroit Sound Conservancy helps restore Motor City music history

In an undisclosed location in Detroit are hundreds of relics from the Motor City’s music history, all collected and archived by Detroit Sound Conservancy.

Glass windows from the Graystone Ballroom, a dance hall that once radiated the sounds of jazz and swing near where the McDonald’s in Midtown now stands, are carefully shrink-wrapped and tucked away into one of seven red, temperature-controlled vaults. The last version of the sound system from after-hours gay bar Heaven, played on by Detroit disco pioneer Ken Collier, waits in one of these vaults, soon to be restored.

Since 2012, Detroit Sound Conservancy — a nonprofit formed by writer, archivist and Detroit historian Carleton Gholz — has amassed these items through donations, salvaging and from personal collections. The group of 30-some musicians, preservationists, teachers, journalists, photographers and more have banded together with one goal in mind: to save Detroit’s musical history. On Monday, they’ll celebrate the organization's fifth birthday at Ferndale’s Otus Supply.

“We’re in a sonic apocalypse,” says Gholz, sitting on a plastic crate outside one of the seven vaults. For much of his life, the 40-year-old Port Huron-born activist, who received his PhD in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh and is now living in Detroit, has documented Motor City music. In the midst of writing a book on the dance culture that emerged in Detroit in the '70s and '80s, he’s witnessed what happens when artifacts are lost to time.

“We’re at the point where we’re going to lose a memory of Detroit’s long 20th-Century music (history),” he explains; Gholz will be speaking on this topic in Toronto on Saturday. “Maybe the most important 50 years in musical making. Some of the stuff is available: You can get your Motown singles, but a lot you can’t get.”

One of the most striking examples of what happens when music history is almost lost to time is "A Band Called Death," a 2012 documentary that shed light on Death, a previously unknown Detroit rock trio now considered to be one of the first punk bands in the world. The film follows the group's rediscovery thanks to record collectors and old recordings, giving the band a chance to tour once more and more important, get recognition that was buried in history for nearly 25 years.

“They put out a record, nobody heard it, history forgot about it and then they found the tapes,” Gholz describes. “So they reissued the record, blew people’s minds, and we know about Death now. This rarely happens.”

Somewhere out there, he claims, are hundreds and thousands of hours of audio of Detroit music history that still haven’t been found. The most pressing need for DSC is to uncover oral histories and digitize them so they’ll be available for future generations. So far, the group has managed to collect boxes of DAT tapes, reel-to-reels, '90s audio from WDET and scores of limited-edition records.

Many items in the vaults are stored in acid-free boxes and folders, which help stop erosion. Music flyers, magazines, newspaper clippings and scrapbooks, including a blue Muddy Waters photo book, line cabinets inside. Faded, yellowed pages stick out from several. To step into the space is like traveling back in time.

“We’re archival renegades,” Gholz says. “I don’t think there’s anybody like us in the city. There’s a real need (for archiving), and there’s this hole.” It’s not that people aren’t interested, he claims — there’s just not enough funding out there.

That’s why DSC has taken matters into its own hands. In 2015, the group raised funds for and wrote the historic marker for United Sound Systems Recording Studios. Earlier that year, it salvaged the Graystone Museum from Detroit’s Book Tower — chairs, signage, even an organ were saved from the disintegrating space. “We had to go in there with gas masks,” Gholz recalls. “The stuff was strewn everywhere; no one knew what to do with it. We could tell there was a problem.”

Then in late 2016 it rebuilt the stage from the Blue Bird Inn, a key venue in Detroit jazz history that was graced by jazz giants such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Like the Graystone artifacts, it was sitting there rotting away. With funding help from Detroit Creative Corridor Center, DSC salvaged the stage and sent it to France for this year’s Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne, a design festival.

Detroit Sound Conservancy members did salvage work in the Graystone Museum in Detroit’s Book Tower. ...more

Detroit Sound Conservancy members did salvage work in the Graystone Museum in Detroit’s Book Tower. Chairs, signage, even an organ were saved.

Doug Coombe

“The Blue Bird stage has a plan with a program on it — you can book it into things,” Gholz explains. “It’s an asset, it does stuff, it goes back into the world.” A goal of the nonprofit is to circulate historical artifacts in a way that’s meaningful and also productive. There’s currently no space to show these items to the public, but securing one is in the immediate plans.

For Michael Fotias of Livonia, 49, who co-owns Audio Rescue Team and is one of five board members of the Conservancy, restoring artifacts and also maintaining their history is a delicate balance — like with the Heaven sound system, which he will be working on. “My intention is to restore it not to brand new, but the shape it was in when it was operating in the nightclub,” he says. “We want to respect the heritage of it as an artifact.

“That place was important to so many walks of life and even though it’s a sound system, it’s the sound system from Heaven and that has a lot of bearings. A lot of those cats are still around.”

Educating people on hidden pockets of the city’s music history is essential to the nonprofit. “The whole world knows about Motown, and most of the world knows about Detroit being the birthplace of techno,” Fotias explains. “But preserving history in Detroit is helping people understand beyond the face value the effect (of this history) on music worldwide.”